Lorena Williams teaches at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. A native of the American West, she continues to write about rock, sage, and the high desert. Her work has appeared in Touchstone, received Honorable Mention in The Atlantic Student Writing Contest, and is soon to appear in The Fourth River.
First Season
My shoulder ached from the weight of the rifle, the army-issue sling digging into my neck with every step. A .243 caliber Winchester, it wasn’t nearly as heavy as Dad’s Remington 788. So I stifled the whines, as a fourteen-year-old learns to do, and marched behind Dad—always behind him—through the frozen hills of eastern Oregon. We had only been out of the pickup for fifteen minutes, but already I longed to huddle on a hillside next to him and doze.
The desert was dark and the sun just tinted the limpid sky. It was early October; my first deer season had arrived during an autumn cold snap, and I wore so many layers of pants it was hard not to crash through the sagebrush like the Abominable Snowman. In our small rural community, folks referenced years and seasons by farm-life cycles. We all knew “the year of the big snow” was 1993, and how warm the weather was during “the end of last deer season.” Despite the biting air of this particular deer season, Dad moved fluidly through the dark desert scrub in front of me, silent but for the soft brush of his pant legs as he walked. Close behind, I unshouldered the rifle and held it across my body with both hands, careful to keep the muzzle pointed away from my father. Feeling the weight and the cold wood of the Winchester, I wondered how much longer we had to walk.
* * * * *
A year earlier, Dad had taken me out to our farm’s shooting range to fire a high-powered rifle for the first time. I was the youngest of four girls, a scrawny, hyper nerd with braces and a long blonde ponytail. Dad of course knew how ungainly and silly I could be, so for me the day had signified a leap in our mutual trust. I had only ever shot plastic BB guns and a kids’ .22 Chipmunk, and there I stood with a relatively huge .243 in my hands. Its rich brown stock featured a hand-engraved checker pattern, and the slick barrel gleamed in the afternoon sun. It was much heavier and more elegant than my Chipmunk. I held the rifle rigidly, afraid of the responsibility associated with it.
“This isn’t a kid’s gun, Lo,” Dad had yelled, as if reading my mind. We both wore bright orange earmuffs and I had earplugs in under those. Dad’s words sounded muffled, more tone than voice. “This thing can kill a deer that weighs eight times what you weigh. It’s not like your Chipmunk. You don’t use it for plunking.” He took the heavy Winchester from my hands and slid the bolt back.
I nodded and feigned concentration as I watched him focus on his lesson. At five foot eight, his legs and arms were brawny and, though he carried a belly, I swore he was stronger and faster than any of the guys on my high school’s football team. I couldn’t have imagined then that my father might be holding tight to his youngest and fast-growing child, or that I only had a few years left to relish such moments before adulthood snatched me from them.
“Like you learned in Hunter Safety,” he continued, “you never, ever let the barrel cross the path of anything living. If you walk behind me, the rifle’s either on your shoulder or held in both hands across your body.” He demonstrated the proper carrying methods before handing the rifle back, bolt open. “Now have a seat on the bench.”
The handmade wooden shooting bench sat on an island, a bare patch of dirt amid an ocean of desiccated cheetgrass. I straddled the plywood seat and rested the rifle barrel on the upper platform. Dad handed me a single piece of ammunition, a pointed brass cartridge an inch and a half longer than any I’d held before. He then motioned for me to chamber the round, which I did with a combination of awe and apprehension. The bolt slid forward and down with remarkable smoothness and the satisfying clicks of steel on steel. Dad warned me a final time to hold on tight and expect a solid recoil.
“Even with a soft rubber butt pad, the rifle’s kick might give you a jolt—and you don’t want the scope to come back and crack your nose,” he added.
I leaned over the rifle and pulled it firmly into my shoulder as Dad stepped out of my periphery. Once the crosshairs were centered on the cardboard target, I cringed, gripped the stock, and squeezed the trigger until I heard an earsplitting report and felt a sharp kick. The force of the recoil was startling, but not painful. I hadn’t broken my nose or dropped the rifle—two sure signs of success. I turned around to find Dad smiling. And though I had missed the target altogether, Dad assured me my aim would improve. He instructed me to keep my right eye open when the rifle fired in order to see my target respond, likening the action to a follow-through pitch in baseball.
“You don’t close your eyes when you let go of the ball,” he explained. “You want to see if the batter hits it.”
We practiced all afternoon until Mom’s whistle floated over the pastures, the signal to wash up for dinner.
* * * * *
I shuffled hurriedly behind Dad, taking two quick steps to each of his. It was the next to last day of the season and we were getting nervous. Just a week earlier, we had comfortably passed up opportunities for risky long shots and long-distance tracking, but now time was short. Dad wanted badly for me to get my first buck and to put meat in our nearly empty freezer, so we’d woken early that morning to get out before dawn when the deer start moving. My muscles ached from a week of hiking, but a sense of duty and a coffee buzz kept my legs moving. Leading us through the draw without flashlights, Dad took an abrupt left up the side of a steep hill where he stopped near the top and turned.
“Okay,” he whispered, so quiet that I leaned in and held my breath to hear him. “You stay here,” he said between deep, panting breaths, “Make sure you’re sitting below the skyline. If you’re up too high, they’ll see your silhouette. I’ll move down the draw a little farther and sit on that knob over there.” He pointed to a small rise at the intersection of two draws where he would see deer moving in from either direction.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
With that, he marched down the steep bank toward his post. We had never separated during a hunt, and I felt uneasy without him. I stood for a moment, the predawn breeze singeing my raw cheeks. The air moved down canyon, a good sign that we made it out on time. Soon, when the wind shifted with the sunrise, our scents would be carried away from any animals heading our direction. The sky seemed to swallow all sound, except for Dad’s distant crunching footsteps. No birds sang yet, and the dark vacuum of the wide-open desert closed in on me.
I found a dense sagebrush to shelter me from the wind and dug out the earth beneath it with my heel as Dad had demonstrated many times over the previous week. The sweet, pungent odor of the plant rose from its disturbed branches. I dropped heavily into the shallow hole, holding the rifle in my right hand. Branches from the rigid plant stabbed my head and neck and forced me to lean forward. I lifted my binoculars to glass the distant knoll for a glimpse of Dad in the coming light. He was working his way up, his orange vest barely visible. Confident in his whereabouts, I leaned into the resistant sage and steeped in my uncertainties.
I wondered what would happen if deer came up the draw and I couldn’t tell if any were bucks. We both had buck tags; what if I shot a doe by mistake? Would we be arrested? And what if the deer came unexpectedly from the top of the ridge and not from down below? I looked behind me frequently, brittle branches snapping with every motion of my bulky, hunter-orange camo jacket. I’d always fallen back on the comfort of having Dad with me in any event, but now he’d trusted me to hold my own post. While proud to have earned his trust, I was scared he might see through to my real insecurity.
I was terrified to shoot a deer. When I first witnessed a jackrabbit writhing at the drop of a forty-five’s hammer, the smoking pistol extended in a farmer’s hand, I had turned away, sickened. In my child’s mind, I had imagined an animal died instantly when shot. The jackrabbit had been a rude awakening into the reality of hunting. While I understood my family’s need for food and Dad’s enthusiasm for my companionship, I regarded my reluctance to kill as weakness. So years later I put in for a deer tag to save face and to win his approval. Now I sat alone with no hope that my dad would shoot first and spare me my embarrassing secret.
The October sunlight pushed weakly from Idaho toward Oregon, moving slower, I was sure, than it did on days I had to get up for school. A thin layer of stratus clouds was stretched like a dirty cloth, torn apart in places to show the crisp autumn sky and stars above. The lights of Boise and Bogus Basin, the area’s ski resort, sat due east, a carpet of dark sleeping farmland between us. I pulled the collar of my jacket above my stinging nose and folded down the earflaps of the rabbit fur bomber hat Dad let me wear on cold days, burrowing into the soft, familiar warmth. It smelled of him—wood smoke, leather, and oils from his machine shop. I snapped from my daze and scolded myself for being an inattentive hunter. The hat’s earflaps muffled all sounds, and I’d been looking out at Idaho for the sunrise and not down the valley for deer.
Lifting the binoculars again, I steadied my elbows with my knees and searched the drainages in the coming light. No movement. The breeze died down in the predawn hour, the sky grew lighter, and the hills revealed their subtle greens and browns. A few nuthatches and finches chirped, fluttering to and from cornfields at the bottom of the watershed. There, they picked and pecked at the remnants of summer grasses that slouched against corn stalks.
I sat, miserably cold and shivering on the frozen, bare earth, and thought about the warm school bus that would soon pass by my empty driveway. I reminded myself that hunting season was a time full of unspoken privileges. The previous day at the grocery store, I had filled my basket with sunflower seeds, Dr. Pepper and Cheetos—foods that weren’t allowed at home. Dad had shaken his head and rolled his eyes, but he bought it all anyway. Beyond the junk food perks, I felt fortunate to see Dad’s broad smile during our endless conversations, his eyes warmly acknowledging my worthiness to carry a rifle and be his hunting partner.
The sun finally emerged from the hills of eastern Oregon, casting a golden hue over the sage and fields. After only a few moments, as if making up for lost time, the long-awaited star cleared the horizon to warm my bare face and hands. I moved my gun barrel out of the light to prevent an unnatural reflection that might alert deer to my location. Dad glassed the drainages almost non-stop, binoculars raised, as I shifted just as constantly to encourage circulation in my legs. Observing him from my place in the sun, I felt bad that he was still in shadow on his south-facing knoll. I knew he’d sat me on an eastern exposure on purpose, where the sun could warm me first.
Distracted and impatient, I spent several minutes watching Dad watch for deer. The cold bit into my fingers and toes. Hunger ground from within. Finally, Dad must have felt me watching him; he turned my direction and we stared at each other through binoculars. He shrugged as if to ask, “Where are they?” I shrugged back. The sun had risen well into the morning sky, and I hoped this would tempt Dad to choose an alternate strategy. We usually found a balance between sitting until close to freezing, walking until close to sweating, then stopping again to prevent dampness and hypothermia.
He shifted side to side in his dirt seat then slowly stood and looked down the drainages one last time before leaving. I waited for him to come to me, watching, as I new he expected me to, for any deer that might be startled by his movement. He reached me, slightly out of breath and smiling, and offered the same shrug of bewilderment. We had expected that getting out before sunrise would be worth the effort. I knew he was upset there were no deer. I was upset that I might have to get up early again the next morning.
He knelt beside me and brushed a weed from his jeans. His salt and pepper hair stuck out from under his camo U.S. Marines ball cap. Though fifty, he seemed younger to me, at least during those times away from the responsibilities of the farm. With his sturdy hands, he unslung the rifle from his shoulder and laid it across his thighs.
“Well, Loey,” he said quietly, “I guess we can head over this ridge and work the next draw.” I nodded and pulled a handful of sunflower seeds from my pocket. I picked out the bright orange lint before tossing them into my mouth. I had recently learned to store the seeds in my left cheek like baseball players do, working them out one by one with my tongue, cracking the shell between my front teeth and spitting it out.
Standing slowly, I cringed as blood rushed to my numb feet.
“You stay toward the top of the ridge and sidehill around to the other drainage,” he whispered as I shouldered my pack. “I’ll drop downslope and walk parallel with you. Okay?” I nodded and spit out a shell.
We moved slowly and quietly, rifles in hand. Skirting around the hill, I came up to a steep drop-off. Dad signaled to go farther up the hill toward the ridgeline where my silhouette would be visible in every direction. I paused, hesitant to expose myself so foolishly. He motioned for me to stay low, and gave me a thumbs up.
Crouching, I walked as lightly as possible to the ridge where I stepped around an impenetrable clump of sagebrush, catching my foot on one of the dead branches. The sapless wood broke with a loud snap. A rush of movement and sound erupted from under the thick brush at my feet. Rearing back on my heels, I hugged the rifle to my chest and turned to face the enormous thrashing blur of brown and gray that tore out of the sage. In that instant of confusion, as hot adrenaline hit me, never did I think to raise my gun. I was stunned, looking up into the dappled brown eyes of a doe.
We were paralyzed; her round eyes, rimmed with long, straight lashes, locked on mine. Her black nose glistened against the white hair that led up to a dark, tufted forehead. The tall doe stood broadside, making her appear even larger, and perched comically on her narrow head were huge ears standing at attention. In the crowded sage, she had been unable to rise and push farther away. So we froze, coupled so close I could smell her—an oily animal scent familiar to me from years of helping Dad skin and butcher deer. Under the layer of tight, mangy hair, her muscles quivered. But her body was strangely still, a stationary carapace barely containing its explosive power. After an endless moment of intimate silence, for a reason only she knew, the doe broke eye contact. Her long neck turned, and with one fluid movement she shot vertically into the air, clearing the four-foot high sage with ease.
She bounded off with a light-footed spring that belonged to an animal altogether different than the one I’d just met. I turned my astonished gaze toward Dad, releasing a deep breath I didn’t realize I was holding. Laughing, he silently imitated my reaction, hugging his rifle to his chest and opening his eyes and mouth in mock fear. From twenty yards uphill, I glared at him, embarrassed. After a moment, I relaxed and smiled, accepting Dad’s teasing in good humor. Mostly I felt relieved that I had not just shot a doe.
While seeing one deer gave us hope for spotting more, the next few hours proved fruitless. At two in the afternoon we hiked back to the pickup for lunch before finding another drainage to hunt. Sitting on the tailgate of his beat-up Ford F-150, Dad poured steaming hot chocolate from a dented green thermos into my yellow Tupperware cup. His cup was the same as mine, but red and filled with coffee from an equally battered thermos. Years before, he had shown me how to ride on rough desert roads with a cup full of hot chocolate extended forward between my parted knees. As we jerked and bounced down a rutted dirt two-track on our way to another hunt, he and I held our full cups expertly before us without spilling a drop.
The heater belched out hot, dusty air and the sun peaked intermittently from dissipating clouds, warming my cheek through the passenger-side window. Dad turned the knob for the radio and, 120 miles away from Boise, J-105 broadcasted an AC/DC song. Our heads began to bob in unison. I sang “T-N-T – oi, oi, oi!” as Dad strummed his air guitar with his right hand, held his coffee with his left, and watched as the truck followed the rutted road without any guidance. We grinned at each other, our fists pumping in the air.
My favorite part of hunting was often not the hunting, but the driving. It must have been Dad’s favorite time, too, for that’s when he told endless hunting stories and anecdotes, recited poetry from memory, and sang the Marines’ Hymn. I didn’t realize it then, but the only other times Dad grew nostalgic and related stories of his past were when he was drunk. What I did know was that I preferred my straight-faced hunting companion father to the one who mumbled and cursed, albeit enthusiastically, through waves of Jim Beam.
In the pickup during our autumn deer hunt, he shared tall tales of great hunting feats and of survival during early hunting days when he and his best friend camped along frozen creeks north of our home.
“Thar I waaas,” he started out in an exaggerated John Wayne voice, “frozen down in a lean-to made of tarps and twine in zero-degree temps, but sure as hell we’d always be out huntin’ again each morning. We got from place to place on foot. None of this chickenshit driving around,” he said in mock-serious tone.
Most of Dad’s stories were of the years that followed those early, primitive lean-to camps. He and a dozen of his friends would set up camp for two weeks at a time in the snowy Blue Mountains of central eastern Oregon. Some years, the camp would have five or six elk hanging on meat poles before the end of the first week.
“Elk seasons when we were that lucky made us all superstitious.” His voice dropped an octave as he shifted from storyteller to philosopher. “We were grateful for the food and more than ever we were sure to waste no part of the elk. Hunting is as much about respect as it is living.”
Bouncing on the bench seat next to my father, I silently considered his story. I was proud of Dad’s noble stance on hunting. I knew somehow that his childhood spent as a runaway, his years in the Marine Corps, and his career as a struggling machinist had all contributed to his survivalist outlook. While the harsh reality of living off the land scared me, I liked the idea of understanding animals and landscapes, of real work that had visible outcomes.
Maybe it was Dad’s hunting philosophy that had compelled me to participate in the hunt itself. With him, the action of hunting felt justified, not thankless—and never macho.
“Hunting isn’t a sport,” he’d say. “Anyone who calls himself a sportsman is just in it for the rack, the trophy, or because he’s trying to prove something. Hunters hunt because they want to eat food that isn’t raised in a factory half a world away. They want to live off the land and they aren’t out there for the trophy buck or to shoot everything that moves. We’re hunters, Lo. And there aren’t too many of us left.”
* * * * *
Dad and I continued to bump down the dirt road, headed for an evening hunt in the hills behind our house. Conversation waned as our late lunch settled in and tempted us to head home for naps rather than out for another hike. The sun had come out completely by the time we hit pavement and the smooth speed of the highway felt unnatural and out of sync with the rest of the day. Out my window, desert, farms, irrigation ditches and untilled fields whirred by. A sunflower seed shell that had been stuck to the pickup’s side-view mirror for three days finally blew off in its first encounter with any speed over ten miles per hour.
Our evening hunt led us northwest, into a wilderness of rolling sage. The sky was clear, and without the morning’s insulating cloud layer, the cold October air rushed in. We were tired and distracted, thrashing lazily through the sage when the rough gray bulk of a four-point mule deer bounded away from our noisy approach, startled from his drink at a nearby canal. Shocked by the unexpected deer, I stood frozen for a moment before Dad motioned for me to move around some tall sage for a clear shot.
The moment was dreamlike; time seemed to pass slowly as adrenaline overpowered my brief hesitation. I reminded myself that my family could live off of a deer that size all winter, and that our freezer was almost empty. In a moment of clarity, I knew I was ready to take on the responsibility of a hunter. My mind switched off as muscle memory took over.
The buck moved off several yards before stopping to look back at us. Dad stepped back with his right foot, tipped his hat up, and raised his rifle. I did the same. My breathing calmed as I dropped my finger inside the trigger guard, the crosshairs steadied just behind the front leg of the buck. As if aware of my intentions, the wild-eyed deer shuddered into a dead sprint. He seemed to fly, cresting the next rise just as the sharp report of my rifle shattered the still air. Searching the hill for movement, I grimaced as the metallic odor of gunpowder filled my nostrils.
“Did I get him?” I breathed urgently, looking to Dad for the answer. Despite our training, I had flinched from the rifle’s recoil. I didn’t know if I had hit my target.
“I don’t know,” he said, still looking out at the distant hillside.
My throat tightened. I was convinced I’d let Dad down. Between us and the ridge where the buck had disappeared flowed a deep canal of rapid, freezing water. It would be a lot of work to trudge down to the nearest bridge then back up the other side in cold darkness for no deer. Nervously, I pulled the clip out of my rifle and flipped the empty shell out of the chamber. My hands trembled and my stomach churned. I didn’t know how I would react if we were to find a deer lying in the sage. It might be worse, though, to cross over and find no deer, and to see the disappointment on Dad’s face.
I lowered the rifle to my side and dropped the empty shell in my pocket. I realized, looking up at Dad’s rifle, that the bolt was closed with the safety on. He had been in shooting position long before I had—while the buck stood broadside, while I’d fumbled just to get the animal in my sights—but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. The decision to shoot had been my own.
“Let’s go see if you got your buck,” Dad said, pulling the bill of his hat down. He squeezed my shoulder tightly, stepping back for me to take the lead.
